A 15-year-old girl keeps sneaking out of the house, doing drugs, meeting with a toxic boyfriend. One night, her desperate father, unable to convince her to come home, grabs her by the shirt and shoves her into his truck. Is he guilty of assault?

A trial judge said he was, but Ontario's Superior Court has just overturned that. The Superior Court's decision is in line with the gut instinct of most Ontarians. This man was trying to protect his daughter from harm. She wasn't physically hurt. The father doesn't now pose a risk to his daughter or anyone else.

The law can't rely on gut instincts, though. So it's important to figure out why this act wasn't assault.

That's trickier than it seems. Children, even teenagers, are under the protection and guidance of their parents. But the old idea that a child is the property of the parent is, rightly, fading away. The baseline, the cardinal rule, of Canadian society must be that no person can hurt another. Any deviation from that rule - within families or without - must be justified.

The Criminal Code does allow parents to use reasonable force "by way of correction." The Supreme Court of Canada has said that doesn't apply to babies and teenagers, who are not capable of benefitting from corrective force. In other words, the father in this case couldn't have spanked his 15-year-old daughter.

The idea that any child, even one between two and 12, can "benefit" from being hit is not one with which all Canadians would agree. But that's not relevant to this case; both the trial judge and the Superior Court agreed that the girl was too old to fall within the acceptable age for corporal punishment.

But the Superior Court said the Supreme Court's decision on spanking and hitting didn't mean there could never be circumstances in which corrective force against a teenager might be justified. In this case, the Superior Court decided that the father's action was "corrective restraint." He was trying to stop her from hurting herself.

The court's logic is reasonable, but arguable. Yes, if a father grabbed his suicidal daughter to pull her out of the path of an oncoming car, or wrestled a knife out of her hand, that would be reasonable. The harm this girl faced, though, was not acute and immediate; it was her ongoing relationship that was risky. After he managed to get her home, she left again and went to the party he'd been trying to keep her from.

Grabbing her shirt and pushing her into the truck wasn't great parenting, and it might not have solved anything (although the daughter's relationship with her parents has since improved.)

Still, it's reasonable to assume that in his mind, all he wanted to do was prevent her from going to a party. At that party, he expected, she would do drugs and be in the company of a violent man. In that sense, the father was trying to prevent her from doing herself an immediate harm.

It is wrong for fathers to think this ruling gives them the right to lock their daughters in their rooms if they take up with unsatisfactory boyfriends. The father's action was probably as minor as any action could be and still meet the definition of "force." His motives, and the relatively non-violent nature of what he did, make this case an easy one for the gut to decide.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008